“I think the surprise to everyone may not have been what happened, but how it happened.”
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In Episode 48 of Localogy’s This Week in Local podcast, senior analyst Mike Boland welcomes recurring guest, Progress Partners Managing Director David Arslanian, to unpack the recent OpenAI/Sam Altman fiasco. David is, as Mike puts it, the podcast’s “resident expert on all things finance and corporate doings.”
Mike and David each offer their theories on what really happened with Open AI Co-founder Altman’s abrupt firing by the Open AI board. And with his eventual reinstatement.
Mike and David briefly unpack what happened. Then they offer some lessons from the bizarre turn of events at the organization at the heart of AI’s rapid evolution from something running in the background to something poised to run every aspect of our lives.
One area that Mike and David discussed is the tension between money and mission. This is a relevant theme given that when OpenAI was founded in 2015, it was as a tax-exempt non-profit with a mission “to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is safe and benefits all of humanity.”
When a mission squares off with money, money usually wins. And OpenAI has created a massive amount of monetary value with solutions like ChatGPT.
“The mandate for a nonprofit versus the mandate for a for-profit organization just breaks down into money,” Arslanian says in the episode. “And those will always be in conflict.”
Time Stamps
- The leadership shakeup at OpenAI and its aftermath 0:44
- Mission vs. money 5:02
- The impact of optics 7:35
- Board dynamics and decision-making at a nonprofit organization 15:25
- The State of OpenAI now and going forward 21:06
- The big winner – Microsoft 23:58
- Summary of lessons learned 24:52
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This Week in Local is Localogy’s weekly podcast featuring engaging conversations on topics important to the local digital ecosystem. The show’s hosts, Localogy’s two veteran analysts, have been covering the local digital ecosystem for decades.
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